Rare death sentence for woman is upheld

STATE SUPREME COURT

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The state Supreme Court upheld the death sentence Monday of an East Palo Alto woman who killed two people execution-style and wounded a third in 1992 robberies of buildings where she had worked as a janitor.

Celeste Carrington, 47, is one of only 15 women among 683 condemned prisoners in California.

The justices unanimously rejected defense arguments that police had illegally searched her apartment and had extracted her confession with false promises of leniency. Her lawyers have another appeal pending, claiming that Carrington's trial defense was incompetent.

Carrington was raised in poverty in Philadelphia and was abused by both parents and impregnated by her father at age 14, according to defense testimony. She eventually attended a community college in Southern California and starred in track and field, competing internationally in the shot put.

She had no criminal record before the murders but had been fired from her job as a janitor in December 1991 for stealing checks. Witnesses at her trial said she had been providing financial support for her partner and the woman's three children.

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Carrington admitted fatally shooting Victor Esparza, 34, a janitor at a shoe factory in San Carlos, in January 1992, and Caroline Gleason, 36, a property manager at a real estate office in Palo Alto, in another robbery two months later, police said. Five days after killing Gleason, she shot and wounded Allan Marks, a Redwood City pediatrician, during a robbery of his office, authorities said.

Carrington told police she had gone to all three offices with a stolen gun and keys she had kept from her work as a janitor.

Gleason was on her knees before Carrington when she was shot, and Esparza was either kneeling or standing, with no evidence that he was resisting, medical examiners found.

In her appeal, Carrington's lawyers argued that Palo Alto police had illegally searched her apartment and obtained evidence that led to her confessions.

Officers from Palo Alto accompanied Los Altos police, who had a warrant to look for evidence of two burglaries. When Palo Alto police saw a key and a pager connected to Gleason's killing in plain view, the court said, they stopped the search, went back to court and got a warrant to look for evidence of the murder.

Even if the Palo Alto police were there on a pretext, Chief Justice Ronald George said in Monday's ruling, they were entitled to be present at a legitimate burglary search and acted properly by not touching anything until they obtained another warrant.

George also said the police interrogation, in which one detective told Carrington that Gleason's shooting was "probably an accident" and another officer suggested that Carrington had nothing to lose by admitting to Esparza's murder, did not amount to promises of leniency that would make the confessions involuntary.